The present invention relates generally to communicating via electronic messages, and more particularly to identifying and managing redundant electronic messages.
Electronically-communicated messages (xe2x80x9celectronic messagesxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9celectronic communicationsxe2x80x9d) such as email, voicemail, paging messages, and transmitted documents have become increasingly popular and pervasive in recent years. The ability to send an electronic message to multiple recipients provides for quick and efficient communication, and the use of electronic messages has become common in business settings.
While electronic messages can be specified in a variety of formats, a typical electronic message will include substantive contents to be conveyed (e.g., text and/or images) as well as a preceding header with various identifying information about the message. For example, a header of an electronic email message might include an identification of the sender and of the recipients, as well as a subject for the message. Headers can also include information such as the size of the message, a specification of the encoding used for the message (e.g., a particular compression algorithm), a specification of the transmission protocol for which the message was created (e.g., TCP/IP), or a unique identifier for the message.
While a user can create and send a message independent of any other messages, messages are often part of a message thread. A message thread is a group of messages that are related to each other, such as when one message is a response to (e.g., a reply to or a forwarding of) another message. Messages in the same message thread will typically share various common message information, such as related subjects or common message content. For example, a reply email or voicemail will often include the contents of the original message as well as additional contents specific to the reply, and the subject line of a reply or forwarded email will often include the original subject line along with a relation indicator such as xe2x80x9cRE:xe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9cFW:xe2x80x9d respectively.
Consider, for example, the following situation in which co-workers send a series of emails that are part of a single message thread back and forth to each other, and each response message contains the contents of the message being responded to as well as additional unique content. Worker A first sends message 1 to worker B and to supervisor D. Worker B then sends response message 2 to A and D, and worker A responds to message 2 with message 3 to B and D. Thus, supervisor D has received message 1, message 2 which includes the contents of message 1, and message 3 which includes the contents of message 2.
While message threads can provide various benefits, a message thread message can become redundant when the contents of the message is included in the contents of other later message thread messages. In the example above, messages 1 and 2 are redundant in light of message 3 for supervisor D, and the supervisor could thus receive all of the contents that are present in messages 1 and 2 by reviewing only message 3.
Current mechanisms for managing pending messages for a user create problems with respect to redundant message thread messages. Pending messages for a user include those messages which have been received but not yet reviewed, as well as those messages which have been reviewed and retained. When a user has received multiple messages that are part of a common message thread, current message management mechanisms store and present each such message to the user. However, when the pending messages for a user include messages that are redundant in light of other pending messages, various inefficiencies result. For example, extra computer resources are needed for the storage and presentation of the redundant messages, and extra time is needed by the user to review each message and to determine what contents are new and what contents are redundant.
The present invention provides a system for managing messages so that redundant messages need not be reviewed by a user. Techniques of the invention monitor electronic messages received by a user and determine whether the received electronic messages are related to pending electronic messages for the user, such as by being part of the same message thread. Redundant messages among the related messages are then identified, and the redundant messages are indicated in one or more ways such as by deleting the redundant messages or by altering the visual indicators of the redundant messages presented to the user.
In one aspect of the invention, multiple electronic messages sent to the user are identified, at least one of the electronic messages is determined to have contents included in the contents of another of the electronic messages, and those electronic messages determined to have contents included in the contents of another of the electronic messages are indicated to the user.